The Bottom Line: It’s a piece of Academy Award history, and a valuable film in the John Ford library, but it survives greatly on its sixty-six-year-old reputation.
`The Informer’ is a movie that doesn’t quite live up to expectations. It won several Academy Awards, and is generally rated highly, but it’s confusing and not very engrossing.
Victor McLagan won the Best Actor award for his role as Gypo Nolan. He gives an adequate performance that never comes close to being remarkable. I suspect his win was mostly due to `Mutiny on the Bounty’ (unseen by me) getting three nominations for that award, and splitting its vote. (Incidentally, this won for Director and Screenplay as well, and must have lost Best Picture by a whisker) McLagan was a character actor, and had only one other nomination, for another John Ford film (`The Quiet Man’), in which his role was similar – less dumb, but more malicious. His one character note is to grab his hat and slap it against his thigh, before putting it on a few lines later.
Like “Rocky”, the film asks me to like a dumb hero. And like “Rocky”, it doesn’t work. But at least Rocky didn’t act shamefully. Gypo’s crisis of conscience at the beginning didn’t command my attention, and the way he dealt with it afterwards – drinking, throwing away his money, and implicating an innocent person – made me increasingly dislike him. All right, he didn’t know any better, the film says, but he should have just gone to his girl and given her the money. I didn’t feel any pity for him as the IRA was getting ready to accuse and execute him.
As I was watching the film, I was trying to work out what the point of the film was. Was it pro-IRA? If it were, it wouldn’t persecute a likeable character. Was it anti-IRA? No, because the film implied that IRA equals patriotism, and patriotism is good. It was definitely anti-English. The English officers barked their lines, and the club where Gypo goes with Terry had English men and Irish women. But at the end…should dumb people be excused for betrayal leading to death because they’re dumb? Why? Gypo knew exactly what he was doing – betraying an old friend for money to go to America. He didn’t realise it would lead to Frankie’s death, fine, but he isn’t brave enough to accept those consequences.
(He doesn’t deserve to have the IRA plotting to kill him, but he could not be dumb enough not to know that being involved in the death of an IRA-man would make a few people a little upset)
The score makes the movie worth watching. It adds to the atmosphere, tension, and stands on its own as music, as every great score does. Recently I commented that the score for “Knife in the Water” stuck out like a sore thumb because it did not fit the movie. Max Steiner’s work here, as it often does, slides perfectly into the film.
The ending of the movie is extremely melodramatic. After being shot (was it four times? I think more), Gypo stumbles his way to a church, to find Frankie’s mother mourning. He asks for her forgiveness, and she gives it. The dying man then stands, crying out “She forgives me!” before clutching his wound and falling. It’s a laughable conclusion. Ford was trying to have a very realistic atmosphere, but lets himself down in having this, and other melodramatic aspects (not least Gypo’s character and the repeated image of the `Wanted’ poster).
The main theme of “The Informer” that betraying your friends is wrong is seriously weakened by this ending. The film implies that Gypo did something terrible, but it’s okay now because he managed to reach Frankie’s mother. Surely a stronger ending would have been Frankie’s mother condemning him, rather than forgiving him. It would have made more sense.
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